TL;DR: Take every Brisbane metro corner where two servos sit under 300m apart and both posted fresh unleaded — 61 corners. Most of them price near-identically: the middle corner has the two servos 1.0 c/L apart. But 3 of the 61 are 20+ c/L apart today, and the widest is 34.4 c/L — an EG Ampol at 199.9 against a Liberty at 165.5 on Beaudesert Rd, Coopers Plains, 272m apart. Fill a 50-litre tank on the wrong side of that road today and you pay about $17 more for crossing it.
I run dual-fuel LPG in an old Commodore, so unleaded is not my tank. But 91 is what most of you are buying, and I drove a courier route across the southside for twenty years, so I know the corners where two servos stare at each other across one road and charge like they are in different suburbs. Opinions do not fill a tank. So we counted it.
The claim
A bloke on Whirlpool once put it plainly about Sydney: “BP at Rydalmere was $1.27 last night at 7:15 pm, directly across the road the United was 0.95.” That is 32 cents to cross one road. The question is whether Brisbane does the same thing, where, and by how much on a real day.
What we checked
Every price here is the Queensland Government price feed — the price each servo reported charging, not a driver’s guess at the bowser. That matters for this one especially: when two servos this close are 30 cents apart, the first thing you assume is someone posted a fake number. Not here. All of it is the government feed, zero user submissions.
We took every servo within 30 km of the Brisbane GPO — 473 of them — and paired up every two that sit within 300m of each other and both posted an unleaded price in the last three days. That gives 61 corners. For each corner we took the plain gap between the two boards. Then we ranked them. A “corner” here is deliberately tight — two servos under 300m apart, staring across one road — not a 4 km neighbourhood spread. To sort the one-day flukes from the standing ones, we also ran these same corners every day from 1 June to 20 July.
What the data shows
First the boring, honest headline: most corners do not do this. The middle corner of the 61 has its two servos 1.0 c/L apart. Two servos across one road, and the price is the same. That is the norm, and it is worth saying before I show you the outliers.
Now the outliers. Three corners today are 20+ c/L apart:
- Beaudesert Rd, Coopers Plains (4110) — EG Ampol 199.9 vs Liberty 165.5, 272m apart. 34.4 c/L. The widest today.
- Mt Lindesay Hwy, Park Ridge (4125) — EG Ampol 199.9 vs U-Go 169.9, 224m apart. 30.0 c/L.
- Baynes St / Oxley Ave, Redcliffe (4019) — EG Ampol 199.9 vs Liberty 173.5, 280m apart. 26.4 c/L.
You will have spotted it: all three have an EG Ampol at 199.9 on one side. That is no accident — 199.9 is EG Ampol’s peak-of-cycle board across the metro, the ceiling eight of their sites sit on today. We ranked all 440 metro ULP boards reading today, and 199.9 sits above 85% of them — near the top of the whole market. The metro median off that same ranking is 175.9 c/L, and 82.7% of unleaded servos are parked in the top 10% of their own 30-day range (Tom counted that for the excise post). So these EG Ampols are not freaks — they are the front edge of a market that is broadly high right now. And on the other side of each road sits a Liberty or a U-Go still on the cheap side of the cycle. Same road, two operators, two different phases of the cycle. I will show the why in a second, because it changes how you should read these.
The verdict
Yes, Brisbane has corners where it costs 20c to cross the road — three of them today, up to 34.4 c/L. But before you screenshot that and treat it as a permanent feature, here is the why, and it matters.
Those three big gaps are a cycle mismatch, not a standing rort. Each one is an EG Ampol that jumped to 199.9 on 8–15 July while the servo across the road was still on the cheap side of the cycle — 165.5, 169.9, 173.5, all a good 13 to 22 c/L off the metro’s 29 June trough of 151.9 but well below the 199.9 across the road. Wait a week and both climb, and the gap closes. We checked the same three corners across 50 days, 1 June to 20 July, and their median daily gap is about 10 c/L. So today you can save 30 cents crossing the road at Coopers Plains — but do not read that as always 30 cents. It is a snapshot of two operators caught at different points of the same cycle.
The corner that is wide almost every day is a quieter one you would not pick from today’s headline. On Anzac Ave, Kallangur (4503), an Independent sits 47m from a Freedom Fuels — closer than any pair above — and across 50 days the typical daily gap between them is 17.4 c/L, with the gap 10 c/L or more on 42 of those 50 days. That is not a cycle spike. That is two servos on one stretch of road that just price differently, day in, day out. If I am pointing you at one durably cheap side of one road, it is that one.
So what for you
The lesson is not “drive to Coopers Plains”. By the time you read this the cycle will have moved and that particular 34-cent gap may be half gone. The lesson is that on any given day, some corners near you have a 20-cent-plus gap hiding in plain sight, and you cannot tell which from the servo you happen to be facing. On a 50-litre fill, the Coopers Plains gap today is about $17 for crossing one road — real money for a U-turn you did not make. Pinly Fuel shows you the price at every servo around you off the QLD Government feed, so you can see the across-the-road spread before you pull in, not after you have already filled on the dear side.
The honest limit
This is one afternoon, 20 July, and the market is mid-to-late cycle — 82.7% of metro unleaded servos are sitting in the top 10% of their own 30-day range today (Tom’s number, from the excise post). In a trough week these wide corners collapse toward that 1.0-cent median, so the three-corner headline is window-dependent; that is why the date is on the chart. A “corner” here means two servos under 300m apart on shared or adjacent road names, and every distance I quote (272m, 224m, 280m, 47m) is straight-line between the two servos’ coordinates in the feed, not a walk down the footpath — so the tightest pairs (Kallangur’s 47m) are the safest to call across-the-road, the looser ones might be a diagonal block. And the durable claim is the Kallangur one, measured across 50 days; the flashy 30-cent ones are today only. Check the live price before you back out of a driveway on my word.
If you run a ute, the widest diesel corner today is the same one — Coopers Plains, that same EG Ampol against the Liberty across the road, a gap in the same 30-plus-cent range as the unleaded. I will not quote you a hard diesel c/L off this feed, because “diesel” here pools the plain- and premium-diesel codes the way the app does, and I would rather Tom untangle that on his own map than have you back out of a driveway on a number I am not sure is like-for-like. He has the diesel corners coming separately.
— Shane